INTERVIEW:IMPROV, MAYHEMANDGAMEOFTHRONESATADELAIDEFRINGE

Following four total sell-out years at the Edinburgh Fringe and an inaugural five-star sell-out run at the 2018 Adelaide Fringe, the smash-hit must-see show Thrones the Musical Parody is back at Gluttony.

The team behind the musical improvisation sensation Baby Wants Candy are set to give audiences their fix of fantasy, satisfy their desire for violence, and provide a year’s supply of sweltering sex scenes and silliness in this even further extended version of this acclaimed musical parody phenomenon.

Updated since their 2018 Adelaide Fringe run, the whole series is crammed into 75 minutes, with all new material from season seven.

Al Samuels from the team is happy to be stepping back on our shores to bring us more Thrones hilarity and madness.

“You can really try, but you can’t keep us away. You can only throw us out so many times. We love Adelaide. Any big Fringe experience is great but, specifically Australians, specifically Adelaide audiences are great. They really kind of jive well with our idiotic sense of humour, I think,” he says.

“We did Edinburgh for years and years, probably been about 15 or 16 times. We just started going to Adelaide in 2017, so this is our third Adelaide. The crowds are even better. I guess Australians are more laid back and they just love the combination of heartfelt and at times ridiculous and, for lack of a better word, filthy, disgusting humour that I think we bring to shows sometimes.”

Having brought Thrones to Adelaide before, and because we haven’t had a new series for a while, you might think the team don’t have anything more to show. You’d be wrong.

“So last year’s show was 60 minutes, and this year’s is going to be 75 minutes because we have new material. We update it all the time. Also the fact that there is now a release date and the new season is pending, that will be folded into the show. So, the idea of the show is that one person sheepishly admits she hasn’t watched the show before and we’re very mean to her,” Al says.

“In this show, there will be a new song, there’ll be new material. There’ll be new stuff, so even if people saw the show last year, they can see a bunch of new stuff.”

Being professional improvisers, the team who also perform in smash hit improvised musical Baby Wants Candy have had their fair share of impro disasters, which Al says is all part of the fun.

“In all of our improv careers, I think early on you run into challenges. We’re lucky because we do a musical and we’ve been doing it for a long time. It’s all improvised so we don’t plan anything beforehand, but you get a sense of what you need to do to make a show successful,” he says.

“And I think if you’re an experienced improviser and you’re patient, the audience don’t mind seeing the disaster, it’s what comes after it. If you screw up a name, if you enter a scene that you’re like, you think the scene is going to go one place and somebody else is going to go another, it’s how you deal with it afterwards that the audience will appreciate.”

And speaking of appreciative audiences, the whole team are looking forward to bringing new stuff and mayhem back to the Adelaide audience who adore them.

“I’m looking forward to doing the new material. I think also it feels like you’re at the top of the diving board with everybody in Adelaide- bear with me for this analogy- and the season’s about to start and I love that we are there right before the show premieres. So we can build on that excitement, we can be excited with everybody. It’s kind of like we’re on our way to Disney World!” he says.

And later this year, Al and the gang will take the show to Sydney Opera House where they will be performing for a month.

“It’ll be really fun. They saw us in Edinburgh and they really loved the show, so we’re coming back in June. That one will have a lot of new material, because by then the final season will have aired,” he says.

You can catch Thrones: The Musical Parody at Gluttony by grabbing your tickets HERE and Baby Wants Candy at the Garden of Unearthly Delights HERE.